"America", Heylin, Peter

This rare and unusual map of the Americas features the island of California on the Sanson model. The western coastline stretches far to the northwest with several inventive place names (Desolation and Zapozipin) and imaginary islands along the coastline. This remarkable coastline looks very much like the early depictions of Alaska after the Russian and Cook explorations in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In the West are three spurious lakes - L. Aquinanbock and L. of Isles and a huge lake labeled The Great Lake of Thongo or Thoya. These lakes all show possible rivers flowing from them into the Pacific denoted as dotted lines. The 7 Cities [of Cibola] are noted in New Grenada. The mythical Parime Lake is prominently shown in South America where there is a surprising amount of detail and numerous place names. This map may have been designed by Robert Morden as there was an advertisement for the 1703 edition of Heylin's Cosmography stating that the new maps were to be by Morden. It is unique in its depiction of North America except for John Senex's map of 1719 that was apparently copied from it.

References: McLaughlin #154; The Map Collector #57, pp. 2-8.

Condition: A

Issued folded, now flattened, on paper with a six-sided star watermark, a tiny paper flaw near bottom center, and a couple of minor archival repairs in the blank margins.